Judgment of thamus summary assigment PDF

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THE JUDGEMENT OF THAMUS SUMMARY By Edaramfon Eshiet In the “The Judgment of Thamus” Neil Postman talks about the Views of Thamus in Plato’s Phaedrus who was a ruler in Upper Egypt. The article also talks about innovations like numbers, calculation, geometry, writing, and the writer's View on it. The article talks about the legend of Thamus and how looking at one aspect of an innovation is not keeping in mind what the end goal is. The story starts with Theuth wanting to show his invention’s to the Great Thamus. Theuth claims that his inventions increase memory and wisdom and suggesting all of Egypt should use his new inventions. Thamus on the other hand does not agree saying that Theuth’s invention has negative effects such as reducing memorization and destroying real wisdom. He furthermore states that the inventions will be a burden on the society. Now the article brings us to the bigger picture it states that it disagree with the proposition that writing is a burden on the society. It also calls Thamus a ‘one-eyed prophet’ who does not account for the good of new technologies but only its negatives. The article also talks about technophile people who speak in favour of a new technology For example people who are eager for each new IPhone drop not minding the fact that there’s nothing new about each drop. The article relates its author (Neil postman) to Thamus who is quite about the positivity of a technology. The article states that most educated people can acknowledge the good of a new technology but are not always impressed by it. To support this, the article talks about Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontent. At first, Freud admits that technology has a positive impact on society like the invention of medicine to improve human’s wellness. But it brings about serious problems to human life that will resist the pleasure that humans can have, like having long distance relationship with family because they are building railway overseas. Freud is called a ‘wise man’ because he sees the good in pushing for innovation and science; he also shows both sides of the argument- its benefits and disadvantages. The article says that there are also things that we can learn from Thamus’ story; Thamus points out about writing will change the meaning of words we already know. He is afraid that memory will be confused with what he called recollection. The process is taking place so fast that we are not even aware That it is actually happening. The judgment is true because some technologies will create new meaning to a new word. For example, the word “car” could mean a flying car in the next 2000 years. This is what thamus means- technology control important terminology Thamus believes that the usage of new technologies have been lead to inequalities, between people who have it and those who don’t, which will lead to what he calls ‘knowledge monopolies’, which means those with this knowledge will be controlling the society it also leads to division of people not only based on economic status but based on how much of the selected knowledge a few of them have. According to Thamus’s views some people gain from this monopolies’ abut there are also those who loose from this monopoly because of the new inventions For example the invention of computers took away the jobs of typewriter manufactures and users and the invention of robots is starting to threaten the jobs of factory workers. Finally, we observe in judgment of Thamus is that ‘new technologies compete with old ones’ leading to a media ‘war’. This was seen during the invention of cars many people were calling out the negatives of it and these were mainly people profiting from the old technology which were horses.

In conclusion the new technologies are inevitably going to change our lives it might be in little ways which we may not notice it but the rise of new technologies and innovations has impacted the lives of every human in a way....